Podcasts, downloadable or streamable digital audio / video shows, have surged in popularity over the last five years due to the ubiquity of smartphones, high-speed mobile networks, and accessible content creation technology.
They offer on-the-go access to expert discussions, clinical updates and educational content, often supplementing and even surpassing traditional resources like textbooks and journals. This portable format is ideal for accessing content during commutes, between cases, or while exercising.
"Learners favour engaging content and high production quality"
Medical podcasts tend to vary in structure and duration, with little evidence as to which types provide the optimal learning content. Learners favour engaging content (dialogues, anecdotes, humour) and high production quality (good audio, credible hosts / guests, and key summaries) for an enjoyable educational experience. However, ‘pod fade’ – content cessation, typically within six months – is common, making it frustratingly difficult for learners to find consistently active podcasts.
NotebookLM
The latest addition to portable learning is Google’s NotebookLM, an innovative AI-powered research and writing assistant. At its core, NotebookLM acts as a ‘virtual research assistant’ that grounds its intelligence in your own uploaded content. You can upload content by feeding it any article as a PDF, Google Doc, audio file (MP3), or simply by pasting text. Once the document is uploaded, NotebookLM can then:
- Create ‘audio overviews’: NotebookLM can transform your uploaded documents into engaging, podcast-style audio summaries with two AI hosts. Currently, this feature is limited to female and male voices with American accents.
- Summarise complex documents.
- Visualise connections with mind maps: NotebookLM can generate mind maps to visually understand relationships between concepts and data points within uploaded content.
- Answer specific questions with citations: directly linking to the exact passages from your uploaded sources. This ‘source-grounding’ dramatically reduces the risk of AI ‘hallucinations’ and ensures factual accuracy.
- Generate new content and ideas, e.g., an outline for a presentation on advancements in urinary incontinence treatments. NotebookLM can help brainstorm ideas and generate structured content based on uploaded materials.
Podcasts are a powerful tool for continuing professional development. NotebookLM is an interesting addition to this landscape, allowing users to create on-the-go audio summaries in a podcast format from key papers or guidelines. As the podcast and AI landscape evolves, more UK-specific resources will emerge, including more software and hardware tools that are already making sound editing and recording easier.
